“So what’s with tall, strange, and striped?” Urahara Kisuke asked in a low voice, flicking his fan briefly towards the stranger’s back as the Captain walked away from them. And wasn’t it ominous to see another glasses-wearing, outwardly harmless man taking up one of the traitor captain’s mantles. He might be Captain of the Third instead of the Fifth, but the similarities made Kisuke more uncomfortable than he’d like. If he didn’t see the resemblance between the original form that his son had shown up in and the appearance of the stranger, he’d be preparing to remove a threat from existence. As it was, he was still keeping track of every action the man made.

(He did not like the instinctive mimicry of some of the most dangerous — and harmless seeming! — Captains amongst the Gotei Thirteen. Aizen, too, had looked harmless throughout most of his life. Too, the man seemed honestly disturbed by him, and that wasn’t a look Kisuke was accustomed to seeing out of such a nearly-familiar face.)

Kaito grimaced. “That would be Sasaki Uryuu. Apparently, in his universe, he got sent back over a hundred years instead of just to the start of the school year. Something happened when we killed Yhwach, and suddenly he was there.”

“Does he know why?” Kisuke watched his son exchange wary looks with his two friends, and braced himself for whatever the boy would say next. A hundred years left a lot of room for changes in a timeline, and given the antipathy that Kaito held for Aizen, Kisuke had no doubt that Sasaki Uryuu had the same. What would Aizen’s early death result in, he wondered. Was it a better world? Worse?

“He blamed his appearance on ‘Gin and Rangiku’. He even called them ‘gakis’,” Ishida replied, with the air of someone not quite believing what he was saying.

Kaito grimaced and continued, picking up as soon as Ishida stopped talking, “And he said that he didn’t think they’d be able to get him back until Rangiku badgered Gin into playing nice with you. Except he called you Urahara-san.”

Kisuke blinked and brought his fan to his face, flicking it open and fanning himself with it just to give his hands something to do. “Well, he would hardly call me ‘father’ if I didn’t adopt him in his world,” he absently told his son in order to give himself a moment to process. Gin and Rangiku. ‘Gakis’. First name basis. Even now Ishida barely used anyone’s personal name, and he knew the other used Kaito’s name when they were in private.

His mind raced away, hunting the trails the details were starting to outline, but there was still far, far too much left unanswered. Still, the picture that was developing looked promising; he’d noticed his son’s tendency towards teaching and taking people under his wing, so it wasn’t a stretch to believe that Sasaki Uryuu could retain that same nature.

Appear in a distant past, potentially near Aizen. The opportunity would have been too good to resist; the Uryuu who appeared would have killed Aizen without hesitation. And then, in a distant time, without a purpose and knowing no one…

Well, Sasaki could have done much worse than apparently becoming some sort of adopted parent for Rukongai brats.